8/27/2023 0 Comments Hospital incubator babiesThe 1943 edition of Standards and Recommendations for Hospital Care of Newborn Infants, first published as a collaboration between the American Academy of Pediatrics and The Children’s Bureau, prescribed that “A viewing window should be provided between each nursery and the nurses’ station, and one between each nursery and the corridor so that relatives may see the infants without coming in contact with them.” These windows placed the hospitals’ youngest patients on display for family, friends, hospital staff, and members of the general community. These nurseries all shared a striking similarity: they prominently featured large windows facing out to hospital corridors. When hospitals built new maternity units to house women during labor, delivery, and recovery, they also built separate nurseries where newborns were cared for, en masse, apart from their mothers. Newborn nurseries became fixtures of American hospitals in the early twentieth century, during the transition from home to hospital as the preferred and default place to give birth. That viewers of all ages and life experience can easily recognize the gravity of a nursery devoid of babies speaks to the peculiar and particular role that nursery windows have played in modern American hospitals. As Handmaid’s’ creative team understands, an empty nursery is jarring. The scene serves as a bad omen of things to come for a community grappling with widespread infertility. The camera zooms in on Offred as she looks in through a massive window into a newborn nursery with three rows of empty bassinets. Two went to the intensive care unit, and the others all have died.” Arriving at the nursery, Offred is taken aback by an unusual sight. Sixteen minutes into the second episode of Hulu’s new Handmaid’s Tale, Offred (Elizabeth Moss), having recently given birth to her first child, follows a nurse to the hospital’s newborn nursery, where her baby will have her first bath.
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